Friday, April 1, 1994

Book Review: David Mamet, "The Village"

David Mamet

The Village

(Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1994. 248 Pages, $21.45)

The most obvious thing about The Village is that we are not
in venues usually associated with the author. This is not David Mamet’s Chicago
or any other big city. There’s a distinct absence of underworld types. Nor are
there con jobs, cabals, sales pitches, or games within games within games.

The setting is a small rural community, which by its climate
and the accent of its inhabitants — Mamet uses ellipses and italics to help us
hear, not merely, read, their speech — appears to be New England. The reader is
led to imagine the kind of Vermont town that consists of a gas station, a
hardware store, a post office, a settlement short on sidewalks, long on dirt
roads.

The inhabitants are brought together not by any physical
center visible to outsiders but by memories going back generations — about what
happened to the last person who claimed to have seen a mountain lion, for
example, and what a bear might or might not have done to a hunter a few decades
back.

Woods surround the village, just as silences surround the
words the villagers use to tell their stories. Mamet manage to capture some of
that silence between quotation marks. The topography of the place resembles the
speech patterns of the characters in other ways as well. In both there are
crevices, hidden places, rises, turns, places to revisit, wander, or get lost.
There’s a great deal that’s unseen and unsaid in this book. Many of the
characters’ defining experiences occur in solitude, often in the woods, and
resist recounting.

The thought processes of Henry, for example, are astute,
philosophical — and shielded. It’s almost as if he fears the fine logic he
discerns in things would be betrayed if shared. Henry’s aesthetic sense is
keen, his contentment after wood-chopping, for example, connected to the way
the jumble of split pieces look: “No artist could do this,” he muses, “It’s too
various.” When called upon to communicate to others, however, particularly to
his wife — the communications impasse between men and women is as pronounced as
in other David Mamet works — the results are halting and pitiful.

If, in The Village, you find yourself momentarily adrift in
unnattributed thoughts, chances are the thoughts are Henry’s. His ruminations
segue naturally into those of other villagers. Dicky, for example, when he
spots a squirrel one morning, thinks that there is no sure way to know, “in
both the shape and the rhythm of the thing, if it was a squirrel or a fallen
leaf blowing across the road,” and wonders why nature devised the similarity.

And Marty, a hunter, is willing to remain perfectly still
and silent against a tree throughout a winter’s day if that’s what it takes to
disguise his presence in the woods. He sees Henry sloshing by in the creek
below and doesn’t greet him. He hears a plane overhead and doesn’t permit
himself a glance. Marty recalls his father telling him that the moment he set
foot in his own house would know instinctively “if there was a deer in there or
not,” and that whenever you’re in the woods, “you’re in the deer’s house.”

There are strongly drawn female characters in The Village,
though here, as in his other work, David Mamet takes greater pleasure in, and
spends more time on, the workings of men. Maris, for example, is a teenager
already experiencing her attractiveness as both a power and a problem.
Discomfort with her mother’s leering boyfriend makes it possible that she will
one day flee the village. Most other characters are inconceivable elsewhere. In
a city, for example, they would be stripped of their keenest senses, converted
into refugees.

Like the author’s plays and screenplays, The Village’s true
subject matter — its real setting — is language itself. Because it is a novel,
we become acquainted with the characters’ interior engagement with questions of
language. How to tell a story, how to be heard and believed, how, especially
for the men, to express an emotion, are among the characters’ most pressing and
sometimes most painful concerns.

Mamet’s dialogue has been criticized for being unlike any
known variety of speech. That’s a bit like faulting Picasso’s guitars or women
for not resembling their physical models. Picasso’s renderings tell us a great
deal about rhythm and color — not to mention women and guitars. Mamet listens
very closely to his characters; the way implicit and explicit are balanced in
their utterances reflects on all verbal communication.

There are conflicts, love affairs, and deaths within the
book, the usual material out of which novels and lives are constructed. It does
not understate the impact of these events to emphasize instead the way they are
recounted. The close listening David Mamet bestows on Henry, Marty, Dicky,
Maris, and the others comes across, in The Village, as a kind of tenderness.